Storage quotas and usage
To ensure fair-usage of storage, the home directory storage and any additional Research Data Storage (RDS) areas have quotas applied to them. The following sections show how to check the quota of the areas of storage you have access to and how to measure your usage of the storage.
We generally ask users to keep their home storage to 25GB or less. RDS storage areas have their own (larger) quota arranged with the owner of the storage. There are no quotas on scratch but an automatic scratch clean-up policy is enforced to delete old scratch files.
Home Directories
Home directories are located on the Isilon storage platform and therefore have quotas applied to them.
Group Storage Quota and Usage
You home directory (folder) is itself in a folder associated with your research group. The group area has a storage quota applied to it – the overall usage is restricted, usually to a total of about 0.5TB. We request that users try not to use more than 25GB each.
You can find out the overall quota and usage for your group by running the following command:
df -h $HOME
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
nas.isilonr.manchester.ac.uk:/ifs/nas/path... 4.0T 2.5T 1.6T 63% /mnt/iusers01
# # #
# # #
# # The overall size: 4TB #
# You can ignore the Filesystem name # Storage used: 2.5TB # You can ignore the
# Still available: 1.6TB # Mounted on name
# Storage is 63% full
Remember, this is the overall usage and quota for your group’s storage area used for home directories. If you use too much storage you will fill your group’s area, preventing you and your colleagues from working!
Your total usage
To measure your own home directory usage please submit the following batch job. We use a batch job because running the command on the login node can slow down the login node for all other users. Measuring your usage can also take some time to complete so running it in batch will allow you to carry on working (or you can log off and collect the result later).
# Batch command run on the login node to measure your home directory usage: qsub -b y -j y -N home-dir-usage du -schx ~
The total storage usage will be reported in a plain text file (in your home directory) named home-dir-usage.o12345 where 12345 will be a job-id number unique to your job.
Scratch
The scratch area ~/scratch is a different filesystem (different physical storage) to your home directory. There is no quota applied to this directory but you are expected to delete unwanted / temporary files after jobs have completed to ensure you don’t use excessive amounts of storage.
The system can also delete files older than 3-months to free up space! (please see the scratch cleanup policy for more information)
Your total usage
To measure your own scratch directory usage please submit the following batch job. We use a batch job because running the command on the login node can slow down the login node for all other users. Measuring your usage can also take some time to complete so running it in batch will allow you to carry on working (or you can log off and collect the result later).
qsub -b y -j y -N scratch-dir-usage du -schx /scratch/$USER
The total storage usage will be reported in a plain text file (in your home directory) named scratch-dir-usage.o12345 where 12345 will be a job-id number unique to your job.
Additional RDS areas
If your group has access to additional Research Data Storage, usually accessible via a shortcut in your home directory named ~/data (or ~/rds) then you can check the group’s overall quota and your usage using similar commands to those used for the home directory:
# Overall quota and usage stats for additional RDS area
df -h ~/rds/
#
# Use the name of your shortcut to your RDS area
# Your total usage in the additional RDS area
qsub -b y -j y -N rds-dir-usage du -schx ~/rds/